I vaguely remember the
first
'House on Haunted Hill', or at shall I say the remake of
the fist film
which originally starred Vincent Price back in the
fifties. So when a
movie takes 8 years before they scrape up a DTV sequel,
apparently a
bunch of people 'vaguely' remember the first movie. The
good thing
about this Direct to Video sequel of a theatrically
released film is
that it's a semi-real sequel as opposed to some movie
somebody made and
then calling it 'Something or Another II'. What is up
for debate
however is how this good this movie actually is, and if
you have a
little over seventy minutes to waste and have a
tolerance for extreme
brutality, you may dig this movie.

So
if I am to remember correctly Ali Larter who played
Sarah in the first
film was the Final Girl. Now Sarah has become a
loon, completely
obsessed with the house and the horror that happened
inside. She's been
trying to convince her sister Ariel (Amanda Righetti) of
this for years
but she's not trying to hear that nonsense. Tragically
when Amanda gets
the call that Sarah has killed herself, she begins to
wish she wasn't
such as crappy sister. But then again, perhaps Sarah
didn't kill
herself. What had happened was that she found out that
there is some ancient relic in the house
that makes it all evil and she knows how to reach it.
However that
relic is worth a few million bucks and having possession
of this
knowledge is what got her killed by the evil Desmond
(Eric Palladino)
and his crew of artifact hunting mercenaries. So it
seems to me that
it's fairly stupid to kill the one who knows where the
artifact is on
the off chance that she may send the secret map to her
estranged
sister, but by golly that's exactly what happens.

So
our criminals grab the busty sister sporting a tank top
two sizes two
small with tight jeans accentuating her badonk, and her
boyfriend Paul
(Tom Riley), and drag them to the house to find the
artifact. Also at
the house is professor Richard from the local U who has
been looking
for the damn thing for like forever, and he's brought
his graduate
assistants Kyle (Andrew Lee Potts) and Michelle (Cerrina
Vincent) who
has an even

bigger set of breasts a
tighter
T-shirt and a bigger ass than Ariel. Well once in the
house horrible
things start to happen to the crew such as a dude
getting drawn and
quartered, a doctor cutting off somebodies face, a
fridge dropping on a
skull and other horrific little nasties, including a
little lesbian
threesome between two rotting ghouls and one of our
mercs who by chance
happens to be yet another breastful, tight t-shirt
wearing female. Well
being how this is survival horror we know already that
not many are
going to make it, leaving our hero girl to find the
statue, destroy it
and save the day. Can she do it? I'm not betting against
the tightness
of those jeans, that's for damn sure.

The
reason I'm kind of down with 'Return to the House on
Haunted Hill' is
that I appreciate that director Victor Garcia had the
good sense to
realize that he wasn't painting the Sistine Chapel here.
I imagine the
budget was probably around a pretty low, so he hired
some
functional male actors, threw a few bucks Jeffrey Combs
way because we
all know he has no conscious, and hired if not the most
classically
beautiful actresses he could find, certainly the
actresses with the
best figures, and I can't be mad at that. Some of the
imagery in this
film is actually fairly jolting and if you're not jaded
as I am, it
might actually give you a scare or two. For you gore
hounds out there
there's some pretty graphic stuff to see that will be
thrown your way.
The narrative is choppy and of course is loaded with
plot holes galore,
but again, this film runs a brisk seventy-five minutes
so there wasn't
a hell of a lot of time for exposition. But just because
a movie is
brief doesn't meant that it can't find a way to be dull
and I'm pleased
to say that 'Return to the House on Haunted Hill' is
never that. No
there's nothing new here that you haven't seen over and
over again,
nothing particularly fresh or innovative, but I thought
it was solidly
entertaining and still left me plenty of time for my
afternoon tea. On
further thought a lesbian threesome that includes two
rotting slimy
ghouls, who amazingly still have young firm breasts,
just MAY be
somewhat innovative.